Joyent Inc.

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For a company that has grown its customer base to 10,000 in two years, scalability is a constant concern. In a given month, Joyent serves up approximately 150 million e-mails and half a billion Web page views. On top of that volume, customers have peak periods during which their activity doubles or triples for a few days or weeks, then subsides.

To meet its growing needs, Joyent needed to pack as much computing power into its data center as possible and do so cost efficiently, while also keeping power and cooling costs to a minimum. From an administrative perspective, Joyent wanted to be able to scale its infrastructure without increasing IT support costs. The company was using Dell and HP servers, but the complexity of the overall infrastructure was a growing problem.

In evaluating its options, Joyent found compelling reasons to choose Sun in its own history of using Sun hardware. Sun equipment required far fewer service calls than comparable third-party hardware. Another powerful reason for choosing Sun was OpenSolaris, an open-source project built around the no-fee operating system, which offers the functionality of Solaris 10 and the support of the OpenSolaris community. The combination of Solaris OS and Sun servers appealed to Joyent because of its need to consolidate vendors and simplify its architecture.

To accomplish this and to put as much power as possible in the hands of its customers, Joyent decided to purchase 20 Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 along with 80 Sun Fire X4100 servers all running Solaris 10. With 6- and 8-core UltraSPARC T1 processors each with four threads, the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers provide Joyent with the benefits of 24- and 32-processor machines in a 1u form factor with low cooling and power requirements.

Joyent can partition these servers using the Containers feature of Solaris 10 and offer its customers virtual servers and expanded server capacity for peak needs. Java developers also appreciate the ability to spread out massively parallel processing jobs over multiple processors for increased throughput.

To provide storage for its customer offerings, Joyent uses the Sun Fire X4500 server—a server and storage device packaged together—with four-way x64 processors and up to 24 terabytes of storage.

By lowering costs using the Sun platform, Joyent has enhanced its competitive profile and expanded sales. In a comparison with Dell servers providing equal processing capabilities, Joyent found that Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers reduced power costs by 60 percent and provided the same processing and RAM capabilities for 90 percent less initial cost and 20% lower TCO. As a result, Joyent has been able to double the number of its servers and CPUs without bringing on more staff to take care of them. In addition to saving datacenter costs, the company has qualified for a PG&E rebate. In short, the Sun CoolThreads technology is helping Joyent grow its business while keeping costs under control. And that’s a cause for joy at the young company.